To understand the marvel that are instant bank transfers today, one needs to travel the long road that money travelled to get to this point. The history of money predates modern banking systems. In the absence of designated currency, mounds of grains, animal skins and even cows stood in for money. The barter system is the earliest exchange of value that civilisation has seen.

But barter wasn’t a perfect system for obvious reasons. What if you had no space left to tend to another cow in exchange for some rice? Or preferred a metre of cotton cloth instead? You had to wait for the double coincidence of wants to be satisfied before any exchange could take place. Then there was the other problem of lack of common measure of value. Was your cow worth the same as the neighbour’s?

So people, wisely, tried to project value on uniform items; cowry shells and feathers quickly gained popularity as currency. Cowrie shells, especially, were convenient for long travels and expeditions due to their light weight. But neither feathers nor cowrie shells had any intrinsic value of their own. Among familiar forms of currency, alloy coins first emerged in the Iron Age. Mined and minted in dangerous conditions, coins were joined by paper currency only centuries later.

Plastic money, a familiar sight today, is a product only of the 20th century, when things started speeding up. Within just a few decades, the digital era unleashed a slew of convenient net-banking services. Long queues and intimidating forms had finally become optional, and online shopping and hour-long fund transfers a reality. In the second decade of the new millennium, this ease took the form of e-wallets. Effort got reduced to simply loading money in virtual wallets, which could pay for services such as cabs, food and mobile recharge as well as make small transactions.

Now Paytm, one such e-wallet, has introduced bank transfers on its platform. Through Paytm Bank Transfer, you can now send money up to Rs 1 lakh directly from your bank account in just a few steps, even on weekends. From arguing over barters and counting change to large bank transfers in just a few minutes, money has indeed come a long way. Watch a visual explainer of the history of money in the video below.

To know more about bank transfers on Paytm, click here.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Paytm and not by the Scroll editorial team.